We think of the Guild Wars franchise as the un-MMO, with all of the depth and
social features you'd expect from an MMO but without the grind or the mandatory
time commitments, and without the monthly fees.

Guild Wars 2 takes the instanced gameplay that allowed us to tell stories so
effectively in the original and supplements it with a fully persistent world
that provides easy opportunities to find existing friends and make new ones. It
takes the flexible and customizable character progression from the original and
adds new options, new playable races, and new personalized storylines. It takes
the optional competitive aspect of the original and splits it in two, so that
it's both more approachable for casual players and more of an e-sport for the
hard core. It takes the unique skill deck system of the original and makes it
more comprehensible, with a focus on quality of skills instead of quantity.

During the past two years of development we made huge advances to our game
engine, adding a persistent world with free-form movement and exploration,
day/night cycles, cutting edge support for dungeons and interior environments,
numerous graphical advancements including support for more detailed environments
and models, better lighting and shadows, new animation and effects systems, plus
new audio and cinematics engines, a more flexible combat and skill-casting
system, and so on. We also built an array of new content creation tools,
enabling us to build a larger and grander world, bring it to life with a wide
variety of events always taking place, create more unique and interesting
adversaries, and tell stories more compellingly than we ever did before.